Jonny points me at a post on the IIAR blog on codes of ethics among analyst groups. In it is a link to this story from HP's AR team.

To paraphrase HP's post, they have issues with a product review from an analyst group that rates a competitor's product ahead of their own. As in most of these spats their product guys want to throw the small print at the analyst group, "Our engineers and marketing staff are still blue in the face showing the 7,328 reasons why the study is flawed". Unfortunately that particular rebuttal strategy never really works out that well.

Where they do have the analyst company on the hook though, is that HP claim the competitor paid for the report. A fact, apparently, that is not recognized anywhere on said report. This sparked a lively debate on codes of conduct on the IIAR's post.

However, the huge, gaping, unspoken question here is why HP didn't simply name names and use reputational damage as their weapon of choice?

Come to that all of the IIAR's other examples are anonymous too.

If HP doesn't feel confident enough to call analysts on this sort of behaviour, what chance has a small vendor?

Codes of conduct are nice for guidance but are seldom actively policed or consistently respected. Surely, this a great example of where a little public transparency by HP could have either snapped this analyst company back into line to protect their reputation, or to have earned them a new reputation as operating in the pay-to-play sector?

The irony here is that our own analyst relations team often need to evangelize on the independence of analyst groups inside our client organizations, where sceptics often assume its all down to pay-to-play (and I'm sure other AR professionals do this too). Being soft on these sorts of behaviours just perpetuates the problems for legitimate analysts and hard working AR professionals.

Tags: IIAR, HP, analyst relations

Postscript: Dale adds a considered post on this theme too, I think we are in broad agreement, but read his post here

Update: 17.03.08 - the AR team at HP have added their explanation as to why they didn't name names and, somewhat optimistically, ask the errant analyst group to voluntarily out themselves and join the discussion.